- Imagine conservation as a three-legged stool. You need the wildlife, you need local people to be committed to conservation ... and you need people to hunt down rare animals and kill them.
- Yes, the way to save wild animals, hunting advocates say, is to hunt them—or more precisely, to extract astronomical sums from rich hunters for the privilege of shooting a few prize specimens.
- Hunting can be a positive force
- it provides an economic motive for maintaining wildlife habitats.
- "Without hunting many of these areas would be converted to cattle pasture, and there would be a rapid loss of wildlife," says Peter Lindsey, a conservation biologist at the University of Zimbabwe in Harare and author of a survey of trophy hunting in Africa.
- When it works, the jobs and money generated by hunting also give local residents an incentive to suppress poaching and keep animals live and on the hoof rather than in their cooking pot.
- A few countries outside Africa, notably Pakistan, have successfully married hunting with conservation. However, in many parts of the world, trophy hunting has fallen far short of its potential for conservation.
- Even apparently sustainable hunting quotas may carry subtle dangers for target species, and some argue that the supposed benefits are overstated.
- Trophy hunting is a growing industry in southern and eastern Africa, with hunters willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a safari that might bag them an elephant or a Cape buffalo.
- In Asia, too, some hunters will pay up to $30,000 to hunt scarce mountain sheep such as the argali, and a few prized trophies such as bighorn sheep in Alberta, Canada, have attracted as much as a million dollars in fees.
- "The underlying theme is the enormous amount of money that people are willing to spend. That can be an enormous force for conservation," says Marco Festa-Bianchet, a wildlife biologist at the University of Sherbrooke, Quebec, in Canada.
- Photo-tourism—the other main way of deriving income from wildlife—can also generate large amounts of money. Kenya, which does not allow trophy hunting, estimates that tourism generated $840 million in 2006,
- However, hunters are often willing to travel to less scenic or politically unstable regions, providing an irreplaceable source of income. Even where the eventual goal is to generate income from tourism, hunting can help ease—and finance—the transition from degraded cattle pastures to a thriving natural ecosystem,
- Most conservation biologists don't think that trophy hunters will shoot enough animals to push their prey to extinction.
- . The hunters take almost exclusively males, so—in theory, at least—the birth rate should be unaffected as long as enough males remain to fertilise all the females. To charge their clients top dollar, hunting operators need to provide a good chance of bagging a trophy-quality animal. A greedy operator who takes too many animals will soon have a hard time drawing clients to a depleted area,
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